How Artificial Intelligence and Wearable ECGs Could Change Equine Cardiology

There has been much fascination about how much information a horse's heart can tell us. The challenge is that much of that information is hidden in signals that are too subtle for the human eye to recognise. This is where artificial intelligence (AI), wearable technology and modern ECG analysis could make a real difference to equine medicine. AI is often portrayed as something futuristic, but at its simplest it is a way of teaching computers to recognise patterns. Give a computer enough examples and, rather than simply following a set of instructions, it can learn to identify patterns that may be difficult for us to see.

For horses, this could be particularly valuable. A modern racehorse can generate enormous amounts of information: heart rate, ECG recordings, exercise speed, recovery time, movement, laboratory results and clinical records. The problem is no longer simply collecting information. It is understanding what that information means. One area where this could become particularly important is the heart.